


Stay

by Siivin



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 15:00:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20047963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siivin/pseuds/Siivin
Summary: Beau had fucked up, like she always did, and now they would ask her to leave. Which is fine. Obviously. She's better off alone anyway.Except no one is asking her to leave, and no one is mad. Everyone's acting totally fine, like she didn't make a huge mistake, and Beau doesn't know what to make of it.





	Stay

The trek out of town was quiet and tense, everyone glancing over their shoulders to make sure they hadn’t been noticed.

Beau lagged at the back of the group, stomach roiling. She’d done it again. She’d fucked it all up, again. Because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, couldn’t keep her head down, couldn’t stay out of trouble for _one night _-

Whatever. It was – whatever. They’d ask her to leave. That was fine. Really, she should probably be leaving soon anyway. Things in the group were getting a little too chummy for her tastes. The whole point of leaving the Cobalt Soul was not to be tied down, to do her own thing, and it defeated the purpose to be so attached to this – this -

_Family_, her traitorous mind whispered, and she crushed the thought before it finished forming. Families sucked. Families ignored you all the time, unless you were getting into trouble, and then you wished they were ignoring you. Families had you kidnapped and sent away in the middle of the night and then disowned you the second they found someone they liked better. This group she’d barely known for two months _wasn’t_ a family and that was _good_. Families were the worst and she was better off on her own.

So it wasn’t a big deal that they would ask her to leave. It was for the best; it had only ever been a matter of time before she fucked things up and now she’d gotten it over with. Now she could move on. She could stop waiting for every straw to be the last, for every mistake to be the one that made everyone exchange That Look, the one that said plainly “_why are we putting up with her?_”

And you know what? That was their loss! She was good at fighting, that’s why they kept her around in the first place. So it shouldn’t be a big deal if she got into a few extra fights here and there. Okay, sure. Punching a Crownsguard wasn’t a _good _idea by any measure. But frankly the pompous asshole had deserved it. Despite everything, she was hard-pressed to regret that part of it.

And it’s not like she had _asked _for anyone to join the ensuing brawl. Everyone else had ended up in jail beside her entirely of their own volition. _That_ part wasn’t her fault, not really, although she doubted the rest would see it that way.

Gods, she’d been looking forward to sleeping in a real bed tonight. Everyone had been. Certainly no one had wanted to spend the night hiking through the muddy woods, nursing wounds and casting paranoid glances behind them. Another thing Beau could take the blame for.

Breaking out of jail had been a tense, surprisingly difficult task. A few spells failing at just the wrong times, a couple extra guards that had been unaccounted for, swings that had gone wide on their end and a few blows that had connected all too well from the guards’ end had left everyone bruised and sore, limping out of town waiting for the alarm to be raised behind them.

She wondered who would have the guts to actually tell her to get lost. Not Jester, she thought. She even thought – maybe – that Jester would object to her leaving. (She wanted to believe so, anyway. _Gods_, she was going to miss Jester. Jester had been her first real friend in – well, in a very long time.) Tears pricked at her eyes and she scrubbed a hand angrily over her face. Stupid. Should’ve thought of that before fucking everything up so magnificently.

It wouldn’t be Nott either, probably. It would be hypocritical anyway. The little goblin had grown on Beau so much more than she’d originally expected, and she found her antics more amusing than annoying these days, but between the drinking and the stealing Beau was a little surprised they hadn’t all ended up in prison long before this. (She’d been doing better lately though. Beau had been glad to see her relying less on her flask. She hoped she’d keep it up, after Beau was gone.)

Caleb might. He’d had bad experiences with prison in the past, she knew, he must be furious that she’d put him and Nott back there again. But he also didn’t like confrontation, and would probably only do it if no one else stepped forward. Though gods knew he and Beau clashed often enough already, so maybe he was already primed for it. (And if their arguments lately had been less heated and more good-natured – if Beau had started to wonder if this is what having a brother would have been like – well. No point in wondering anymore.)

Molly wouldn’t be sorry to see the last of her, the asshole, but outright telling her to leave didn’t really seem his style. He was probably the most concerned with team unity after Fjord, though, and certainly wouldn’t hesitate if he’d decided it was necessary. (Molly was the first person to join the brawl, intercepting a Crownsguard baton meant for Beau. Beau knew – everyone knew – that their animosity was largely feigned at this point, but the absolute rage on his face as he spat Infernal at the man targeting her had still taken her aback.)

And Yasha – well. Beau couldn’t imagine Yasha telling her to leave, but that might just have been wishful thinking on her part. It hurt, to think of Yasha telling her to leave. To think that she might have earned Yasha’s disdain or contempt. (She’d been flirting less with Yasha lately. In the beginning it hadn’t mattered. If Yasha had responded, great, they could have a good time together. If not, well, she’d be moving on soon anyway. But as they’d traveled together her interest had shifted from purely physical to something deeper, more real. It was awful and scary and exciting and amazing and she’d thought – she’d thought -)

That just left Fjord. He was most concerned with the group’s unity and prided himself on practicality. He’d have no problems telling her to leave. At least he’d probably be really polite about it. (Beau had been seeing the cracks in his facade lately. Times where his bold, charismatic leadership gave way to insecurity and self-doubt. She’d wanted to tell him he was doing a good job, that the group relied on him for a sense of cohesiveness and security. If she had to go, she was glad the group would still have Fjord to look out for them.)

Fjord broke the silence about two hours into their trek and Beau couldn’t help but flinch a little. “I reckon that’s probably far enough for tonight,” he said wearily. “I think we’ll be okay for a few hours at any rate. With any luck, no one saw us leave town so they won’t know where to start searching.”

The tension was suffocating as the group made a bare-bones camp. Nott started a small fire as everyone else dragged bedrolls out. Molly passed around some jerky, claiming it to be too late to do any real cooking. Beau set her bedroll out on the outskirts of the group and waited. Would they tell her now? Were they going to wait until morning?

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Better to just get it over with.

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?”

“What did you do now?” Molly asked without looking up from where he was flopped on the ground.

“The fight, asshole. At the bar,” Beau spat. He didn’t have to make this worse.

“What about it?”

Beau looked around to find everyone staring at her with varying levels of curiosity and felt, rather suddenly, like she had missed something.

“I punched a Crownsguard who was annoying me, and we all got thrown in jail,” she said slowly, as though maybe they’d all somehow forgotten the last six hours.

“Oh yeah,” Jester said, bouncing over with way more energy than someone should have after a jailbreak, “but he was like, really stupid and he was being sooo dumb, so it’s really not bad that you hit him because he really deserved it, right?”

“I got us thrown in jail though,” Beau said when no one seemed inclined to argue.

Nott shrugged. “I mean, we got out pretty quick. It wasn’t even a bad jail. I’ve been in lots of them and most of them are way grosser.”

“Why did you punch him?” Fjord asked curiously. “I wasn’t close enough to hear what was happening.”

“He was just being a dick,” Beau said defensively. “Trying to throw his weight around and intimidate a bunch of drunks – wait, if you didn’t know what was happening, why’d you get involved?”

“Well I wasn’t gonna let ya fight the whole town guard on your own,” he said, as though explaining a simple concept to a child.

“I helped because he really was being a dick, Beau, you were right. It is good that we were there to teach him a lesson!” Jester volunteered.

“I’m always up for causing some trouble for the Crownsguard,” Molly said, having finally sat up to join the conversation. “Keeps life interesting.”

“I was trying to keep all of you from getting into any more trouble than you were already in,” Caleb said dryly. “That, ah – that didn’t really work. But no harm done in the end, eh_?_”

Yasha caught Beau’s eyes and smiled, a soft, subtle thing that made Beau’s stomach knot up for a completely different reason. “I trust your judgement,” she said simply.

“Really?” Beau said. She prayed no one noticed the way her voice shook. “You guys aren’t even like, upset we had to fight our way out of jail?”

Molly snorted. “As if that’s the first time anyone here’s done that.” A round of sheepish nods indicated that most of the people present did indeed have some experience in this matter.

“Oh,” Beau said. _Let it go_, her mind told her, _don’t question it, just accept it before they change their minds_ – but she couldn’t help pushing it just a little, just to see how bad it really was, like poking at a bruise to see if it actually hurt. “I thought you guys were gonna like, kick me out or something.” She forced a hollow laugh, hoping it would play off as a joke.

Jester made a distressed noise and a second later Beau was staggering under her weight as Jester enveloped her in a rib-cracking hug.

“Beau we would never kick you out, how could you even think that!” Jester said, voice muffled from where her head was buried in Beau’s shoulder. Beau wheezed slightly in response, hoping Jester would get the hint, but if anything her grip only tightened. “We love you so much, nobody wants you to leave! Right everyone?” She finally relented and released her hold on Beau, who took in a rasping breath as she regained the ability to breathe.

Fjord laughed softly. “Well, I won’t say I couldn’t do without the brawling, but no. No one wants you to leave, Beau.”

“I, on the other hand, am more than up for a good brawl now and then,” Molly said. “Especially if it’s for a good cause.” His tone was casual, but his eyes were intent as he peered at Beau in the flickering firelight, and she had the uncanny sensation he could see right through her.

Nott nodded vigorously. “I mean, I know I draw a lot of attention, looking like this. And I know sometimes I have problems with my Itch. But you’ve always been really nice to me despite all that! We’re not gonna kick you out just because you started a few fights!”

“_Ja_, we wouldn’t want things to get too boring around here, after all,” Caleb said with a soft smile.

Yasha was silent for a moment. Then she turned and met Beau’s eyes with that piercing stare that always made Beau forget to breathe for a minute.

“I don’t want you to leave,” was all she said. Then she turned away again, curling in on herself as though embarrassed to have spoken.

“Yeah, well,” Beau said in the following silence. Her voice was embarrassingly rough. She was _not_ going to cry here. She wasn’t. “Good. Because you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

“We should be so lucky,” Molly said. “Can I go to sleep now?”

“Go fuck yourself,” she told him. She couldn’t say what she really meant, not yet, but she trusted him to understand anyway. He grinned and flipped her off before turning back to his bedroll, and like an unspoken signal the rest of the group went about settling in for the night.

Jester dragged her bedroll over next to Beau’s, chattering mindlessly about her plans for the next day. Beau knew from past experience that whoever slept next to Jester would generally wake up to find a tiefling wrapped tightly around them in the morning. Tonight, she could admit to herself that she wouldn’t mind – would be glad of it. And judging by the undertone of worry still lacing Jester’s voice, she could do with the reassurance as well.

She lay in her bedroll as the rest of the camp went quiet, Caleb and Yasha taking the first watch with customary silence. She was still struggling to wrap her mind around what had just happened.

She’d been thinking of her departure from the group as a when, not an if. She fucked things up, it’s what she did. Everyone saw that and got rid of her eventually. But now, even after she’d majorly messed up, nobody wanted her to leave – nobody even seemed to be mad at her.

It was weird, and she didn’t understand it. But she had to admit, it was . . . nice. To be wanted, and forgiven.

_Maybe this is what family is_ supposed _to be like_, her mind whispered, and this time she was not so quick to crush the thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism is welcome!


End file.
